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Who needs facts when you can rile up people with a loaded word like Obamacare?

A new poll from Rasmussen Reports, just out this morning, finds that 39 percent of "likely U.S. voters" view Obamacare favorably, while 57 percent view the law, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, unfavorably. That's the second-highest unfavorable finding to date in the Rasmussen poll, just short of April's 58 percent, but within the 3 percent margin of sampling of error and outside the 95 percent survey confidence level. Needless to say Obamacare is not popular.

But ask people about the Affordable Care Act, without bringing up embattled and unpopular President Barack Obama, and attitudes change. This video from comedian Jimmy Kimmel, unscientific as it may be, explains:

This is important because a couple of legitimate criticisms of American healthcare are making the Internet rounds now, but wrongly drawing the politically charged ACA into the debate, presumably to mislead and manipulate the uninformed.

I can't verify all of the statistics, but the claim that 195,000 people died from medical malpractice in 2011 nationwide sounds like it's in the ballpark. I base this on a September 2013 paper in the Journal of Patient Safety, which found that U.S. hospitals annually commit as many as 440,000 preventable adverse events that lead to or at least contribute to death, as well as the seminal 1999 Institute of Medicine report, "To Err Is Human: Building A Safer Health System," which placed the number of preventable deaths a year in U.S. hospitals between 44,000 and 98,000.

As the former paper's author, author John T. James, ex-chief toxicologist for NASA and founder of advocacy organization Patient Safety America, pointed out, the IOM made its estimates based on a limited data set, at a time when hospitals were not encouraged to report errors. Plus, not every preventable adverse event meets the legal definition for medical malpractice, so let's accept the claim of 195,000 deaths as accurate enough.

But the graphic is misleading and disingenuous. It doesn't matter what insurance coverage you have, or even if you have insurance at all. Hospitals are dangerous places, and not because of Obamacare or any other piece of legislation signed into law by any U.S. president in history. It's because of poorly designed processes that lead to medical decisions being made without fully knowing or understanding a patient's condition. It's because of physicians who refuse to put their egos aside and admit they don't know the answer to a medical question or healthcare professionals who don't properly communicate with their colleagues. It's because of poor infection control in hospitals. It's because of a fee-for-service paradigm that makes high volume more important than high quality, and that encourages over-testing, over-operation and over-treatment.

Interestingly enough, the Affordable Care Act contains language that encourages more of a focus on outcomes and makes hospitals accountable for patients after they're discharged from inpatient care. But do you think the general public knows this? No way. People associate Obamacare with insurance coverage and insurance coverage alone. That's the fault of the White House, which has done a terrible job of explaining the president's signature legislative victory. It's the fault of the national consumer media, which have led people to believe that Obamacare is all about insurance.

It's, of course, also the fault of partisan hacks on TV and the Internet who can insert Obamacare into any discussion about any healthcare issue whatsoever, and people will believe whatever fits their own political biases. The source of the graphic appears to be seano.org, the blog of Sean O'Reilly, a journalist who describes himself as a "Conservatarian."

Oh, the fact that the data are from 2011 should be a red flag as well. Nobody had insurance from ACA exchanges until 2014. But try explaining that to undereducated people whipped up into a rabid frenzy every time they hear the word "Obamacare."

Meanwhile, yesterday I received a spam e-mail that said the following (URL redacted by me so I don't give the author free publicity):

To whom it may concern:

My best friend has been hobbling on a broken femur for 7 months because ObamaCare is a FAIL and doctors no longer have a Hippocratic Oath. Money before healing is the New Oath.

My friend Jason has started a fundraiser and is only trying to raise the initial $12,500 so he can get in to surgery then after recovery and rehab he can find work once again (He hasn't been able to provide for his family in 7 months) he will begin to pay off the rest of the medical bills.

Please read his story and help him out please?

ObamaCare [sic] may be a fail, or it may not — it's far too soon to tell — but money has come before healing for decades, just like medical errors have been a problem for decades. I remember when I first became cynical about American healthcare, when I read the quarterly report from a for-profit hospital company lamenting the fact that revenue was down because the flu season was less severe than had been anticipated. As if fewer cases of the flu is a bad thing.

This happened in 2001. The ACA passed in 2010. Tell me again how Obamacare killed the Hippocratic Oath?